Speaking at Developer Day South West

I have just heard I will be speaking at Developer Day South West on June the 5th. My subject is Using the new Developer and Test features of VS 2010 to track down and fix bugs, this is basically the same session as I have at our TechDays fringe event yesterday. Hope to see you there

April 16, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Todays #UKTechDays Leeds Fringe event

Thanks to everyone who turned up for Matt Nunn’s and my sessions in Leeds today. All seemed to go well and were well received. As my slide stack consisted of a a welcome screen and an agenda I don’t really see the point of posting them on web. If you want to see the end to end story of VS2010 ALM I would suggest looking at the video’s on Channel 9. ...

April 15, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Video of MVP at Microsoft Techdays events

Whist at the the UK Techdays I did a video with Rob Miles. You an see the results here, we are near the end. A full video of my session should be available on the Microsoft UK Techdays site soon

April 15, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Useful tool to move Reporting Services reports between servers

When you are moving TFS contents around between servers, as many people will be doing as they implement new 2010 servers and want to make use of Team Project Collections; you often have to move Reporting Services reports. In many cases you find people have lost their customised .RDL files they uploaded in the first place, and don’t want to restore the whole Reporting Services DB. So how to extract an RDL file from a Reporting Services instance and moving it to a new Reporting Services instance? ...

April 14, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking at the Typemock Academy in Olso in a couple of weeks

I am really pleased to say I will be speaking at the first Typemock Partner Academy in Olso the week after next. I will be talking about using how we at Black Marble have used Isolator to improve the speed and quality of our SharePoint development.

April 14, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Follow up on my TechDays Lab Management session about the cost.

I have seen a few tweets after my Techdays session on Lab Management that it sounded expensive. It is true that Lab Management is an extra license to purchase over and above Visual Studio. However under the new licensing model for VS you have to remember that as an MSDN subscriber you are already licensed for a TFS CAL and Server and if you have VS2010 Ultimate you are licensed for the Test Professional tools. With this collection of tools you can do much of the bits I showed in my session: ...

April 13, 2010 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Goodbye Team System hello Visual Studio ALM

Now that VS2010 has launched the branding of ‘Team System’ has gone; so I am no longer a MVP (Team System) but a MVP (Visual Studio ALM).

April 13, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Down in London for TechDays

I am down in London for the first two days of the Microsoft TechDays event. First day has been very interesting, there seems to be a good buzz over the new testing features. So it looks good for my session tomorrow when I will be presenting on Lab Manager hope to see you there.

April 12, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Error running Ivonna tests with ASP.NET 4

When I tried to run a working Ivonna test, previously targeted at .NET 3.5, against .NET 4 I found my test failing with the error -—– Test started: Assembly: Webpart.Tests.dll —— Bad Request Setup information Physical Web path: C:ProjectsTestTypeMockSampleTestWebSite Actual path: C:UsersfezAppDataLocalTempTemporary ASP.NET Filesroot156567f2 Turns out that the fix to simple, you have to use an absolute path i.e. the / in front of the BasicTest.aspx is vital \[TestMethod, Isolated\] public void LoadWebPage\_HelloWorldWebPart\_NoError() { TestSession session = new TestSession(); //Start each test with this WebRequest request = new WebRequest("/BasicTest.aspx"); //Create a WebRequest object WebResponse response = session.ProcessRequest(request); //Process the request System.Web.UI.Page page = response.Page; //Check the page loaded Assert.IsNotNull(page); } So this is a temporary work around for now, for me it is not an issue having to use a absolute path. I understand from the [writer of Ivonna](http://www.sm-art.biz/Ivonna.aspx) that this issue will be further investigated now that .NET 4.0 has RTM’d

April 12, 2010 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Experiences upgrading to Lab Manager 2010 RC

Whilst preparing for my session at Techdays I have upgraded my 2010 Beta2 Lab Manager to RC. I am pleased to say the process is far more straight forward than the initial install. Again I used the Lab Manager team blog as my guide, they have revised ‘Getting started with Lab Management 2010 RC’ Parts 1, 2 ,3 and 4 posts to help. I was able to skip through the initial OS/VMM setup as this has not altered. I chose to throw away my TestVM (with its Beta agents) and create a new one. I upgraded my TFS 2010 instance to RC. The only awkward bit was that I had to extract the RC version of the Lab Build Template from a newly created RC Team Project Collection and load it over my existing Beta2 version. I then recreated the Lab E2E build – and it just worked. My basic sample created for Beta2 build and tested OK. ...

April 1, 2010 · 2 min · Richard Fennell